Last week, it was revealed that Evernote (News - Alert) would be among the first investors in iSpeech – a startup providing free text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition software – for its new publisher platform. This week, the big name in the industry is Google (News - Alert), and the startup is one that comes from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto (U of T).

The start-up founded by University Professor Geoffrey Hinton along with two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever – is called DNNresearch Inc., and was officially put into place in 2012 by the deep neural network experts. Now, the company has truly made it after being acquired by one of the biggest industry players, Google.

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 So what goes Google hope to accomplish by bringing on these new collaborators? A solution that significantly improves object recognition, for one, and advances made in neural nets can directly and drastically improve many sectors.

The official release elaborates, “Hinton is world-renowned for his work with neural nets, and this research has profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding.”

U of T’s President, Professor David Naylor, congratulated Hinton and displayed his sheer pride in said statement, adding, "The discoveries of brilliant researchers, guided freely by their expertise, curiosity, and intuition, lead eventually to practical applications no one could have imagined, much less requisitioned.”

And the compliments just kept rolling in at the apparently extremely warm and encouraging community over at U of T, where Computer Science Chair, Sven Dickinson added, “This is a wonderful opportunity for Geoff, and a great opportunity for the department…In recent years, we have been expanding our industrial relations, and this acquisition represents a wonderful opportunity to strengthen our existing ties with Google, one of the world's most innovative IT companies."

We’re clearly seeing a pattern of high interest and interaction with speech recognition start-ups, and we hope it continues!